Corrupt cop opera on Sunset Boulevard

Thursday 30 October 1997 00:00 BST

Alert cinemagoers will by now have heard the buzz on LA Confidential, which has spread across the Atlantic like a swarm of bees. Hasty - and perhaps ill-considered - comparisons have been made to Chinatown, investing it with a kudos that is not entirely warranted.

This being so, the best way to approach the most enjoyable Hollywood movie of the year is to ascertain what it is not. It is not, by any stretch, a masterpiece. Nor will it be considered a classic even in the benign distorting mirror of hindsight.

It adheres to no classic themes, delivers no classic motifs, offers no classic characters or - with few exceptions - dialogue that will sink into the public memory to be (mis)quoted in years, decades to come. Its narrative structure is labyrinthine, evasive, barely resolved, sliding and bouncing from one sub-plot to another like a sphere in a pinball machine.

None of which prevents it from being one hell of a movie.

Looted from the pages of James Ellroy's even more labyrinthine and complex novel, it is a sprawling picture of the Los Angeles Police Department in the early Fifties. A period when Hollywood Babylon was at its Babylooniest; post-war, mid-cold war, a time when the studios were under threat from the upstart television, when film star glamour was jaded, faded and tarnished following the unassailable studio-dominated decades of the Thirties and Forties. An era when tabloid journalism homed in on the private lives of movie stars like a missile, seeking scandal involving drugs, sex, more drugs and more sex.

This is the background to LA Confidential. Hollywood is the beat of the cops in question. And what a bunch they are.

As Lee Tamahori attempted with less success in Mulholland Falls, LA Confidential depicts a community whose police come in two varieties: the corruptible and the corrupted. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is firmly in the latter camp. A publicity-hungry narco detective, he works hand-in-glove with Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), editor of a scandal magazine called Hush-Hush which specialises in exposing Hollywood's lower depths, even if it means manipulating the celebrated victims into compromising situations. Hudgens tips Vincennes to potential arrests, photographs the results and splashes them all over his front page. Vincennes also acts as consultant to the TV series Badge of Honour, a thinly disguised version of Dragnet.

Herein lies the prime irony of LA Confidential. For the police badge is anything but honourable. "Take out your badge," advises police captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) to a colleague. "Show them you're a policeman." By this stage, after two hours plus of corruption, sleaze, death and miscellaneous mayhem perpetrated by the policemen themselves, the bell of irony tolls loud and clear.

There are some heroes among the rogues' gallery. Bud White (Russell Crowe) is a thuggish, volatile detective, often used by Capt Smith to put the frighteners on ne'er-do-wells or simply beat confessions from suspects, whose redeeming feature is his psychotically protective attitude to women. White's fellow cops come in various shades of overweight, alcoholic, bribable types as ever drew breath (or blood) on Sunset Boulevard.

Into this swamp of corruption and violence strides shiny new boy Lt Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), whose ambition is fuelled by the legacy of his father, a policeman killed in the line of duty. Exley is a lean, clean, political cop - the new breed - and his ideas and ideals do not sit well with his colleagues or superiors. Following an internal investigation, Exley gets promotion and glory when he single-handedly appears to solve the case of The Nite Owl Murders, a mass shooting in a coffee bar in which a former cop is slain.

This incident is the ignition of the plot that throbs and revs throughout, riding through a tangled narrative involving missing heroin, gang warfare, prostitutes who have been surgically enhanced to resemble movie stars, pornography and blackmail. It is unnecessary to dwell further on the intricacies of the narrative. Suffice to say you need to keep your wits about you and your eyes and ears open for every clue.

Beginning as enemies, Exley and White ultimately forge an alliance of opposites to root out and destroy the corruption deep within the department. En route, they both fall for the same girl, Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a Veronica Lake clone and one of the pool of lookalike whores run by the wealthy Hollywood entrepreneur Pearce Patchett (David Strathairn).

Director Curtis Hanson is clearly more interested in the evolution of his characters, the slow-burning nature of self-knowledge than the epic thrust of theme and motive. He controls the film through them, leaving the major themes buried beneath the narrative, interstices in the margins of the story. It is not a fault, but it prevents the film from vaulting into classic status.

It is, none the less, a terrifically enjoyable and wholly satisfying movie, a rare commodity to come from a Hollywood major these days. It recalls the last great Hollywood decade, the Seventies, when good directors were allowed to make serious movies without undue interference from merchandising departments. If LA Confidential recalls anything, it is less the films noirs of the Forties - though its attention to period detail is slick and sharp - than urban epics like Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City.

Above all, this is a film about Hollywood in general and movie stars in particular. The shadows of disillusionment and broken dreams are everywhere present. "Thanks to Pearce," says Lynn Bracken of her pimp, "we still get to act a little." It is the wounded cry of a small-town girl whose big-screen aspirations have been reduced to the casting couch without the casting bit.

A sterling cast, a meaty script, high production values and a confident hand at the tiller. It all adds up to a piece of rock-solid entertainment with a body and a brain to match. Who could ask for anything more?